Maybe I shouldn’t
say “twit,” but unlike “bimbo” the word is not gender-specific in its
connotations, which do not include any sexual ones. The woman Mark Belling
referred to was acting like a twit, at least in the moment she spoke about right
to work legislation without knowing what it is but thinking she did. Yet she would
have been a twit even if she were a man.
Anyway….
Another woman felt
compelled to quit her employment with Governor Walker’s campaign – I guess that’s
what it is by now – because her tweets proved offensive to Iowans of influence
in the Governor’s party. Maybe she deserved a setback. She should rethink the
uses of social media before seeking employment as an expert in that field
again.
I’ve never
tweeted anything, but I do know that tweets lack context. An isolated string of
140 characters, even if they form words and constitute a sentence, has little
but itself to give it meaning. Moreover, one who tweets cannot legitimately
expect anyone who happens to read a given tweet to be a follower. The same is
true of hashtags.
Thus readers
are free to give a tweet any context they desire, even compelled to do so. This
is what happened to the quitter. She tried to make up for it by issuing a whole
paragraph of early morning tweets, but the fact she had to issue them in six or
eight installments only tends to prove my point.
In general,
only a very profound, or a very trivial, sentence carries its own context with
it – that is, sufficient context to make its meaning unmistakable. Users of
Twitter should probably confine themselves to the trivial. Unfortunately, most
political discourse, on the other hand, is neither profound nor trivial. This
is what our Twitter quitter should reflect on.
Tweets are like
sound bites that way. Only with sound bites the context, sometimes maliciously,
gets edited out. Tweeters have only themselves to blame.
